January 27, – The Mauritanian Desert
Feb 3rd, 2024 by rallyadmin
The Bedouin tent was great but the Bedouin mattress was rock hard. I mean, I like hard a hard mattress but this was beyond my likes. I sleep in snatches, tossing and turning trying to find some position that is comfortable.
The only good parts were that the mattress was marginally better than the thin sleeping pad but only by the slimmest of margins. And getting up in the middle of the night for a bio break for a walk to the beach was positively serene under the full moon and quietly lapping surf.
Rat packs for breakfast and as we are breaking camp and packing to go back to another day in the desert, Billie’s (Team 2) Mitsubishi L200 has a flat tire. It’s a cut or maybe a fatigue crack in the sidewall but the tire is a throwaway now. On goes his only spare. This could become an issue so he decides to miss today’s desert run and meet us tonight after the beach run. Because the Volvo is overheating, Teams 10 and 21 join him.
Adam (Team 12) gets out his “illegal” drone and lines up his team of 5 cars for a chevron shaped drive down the beach. (Drones have been illegal throughout the trip so far. Got me.) After the usual organizational confusion he has a great drone shot of his teat driving down the desert flat just behind the beach which we photo-bomb from the rear. We veer off from the shoot and head off into the desert.
Again the wind starts to come up and the visibility goes down. But the desert is still magnificently beautiful, the ever-moving sand, the rolling dunes and the tracks between them. We stop and climb up one of the higher volcanic hills for a view around. Beautiful! No roads, buildings, wires or mobile phone towers.
We follow a track that only our guide knows. We can guess where we are from our GPS devices but if we had to fin our way out of the desert we would have to drive either due west to the ocean and probably only find the ocean. Or drive east until we high the main north/south highway. At least, we could find civilization that way.
We continue for most of the day and then we pop out onto the main highway. Take a right and continue on the highway that gets closer and closer to the ocean again. Another right on to a dirt track and a couple of kms to the beach again at the entrance to a marine national park.
We are met by a park guard and we pay a small entrance fee. There is the skeleton on a right whale displayed on the beach. The sight of the skeleton seems very incongruous, west Africa hardly seems like a place for whales. But there’s a warning sign that it is illegal to remove fossils from the park. Who’d have thunk it?
We move another kilometer to a police checkpoint and we are swarmed by small children begging for gifts, food or money. It’s a sad sight but this village is obviously very poor and there’s nothing that we can do that will change that. Perhaps on future challenges we can bring an organized donation to this village that we always use as the entry to the beach run but now all we are doing is creating beggars.
A policeman comes out of the post house and shoos the children away and a few minutes later we move another few hundred meters closer to the beach entrance. And, of course, the children soon find us there and the begging starts again. A woman who we think might be the school teacher comes out of a building that we think is the shool and gathers all the girls and leads them back to the building, leaving the boys who eventually are shooed off again.
When we have all of the cars together again, we head onto the beach which first requires a steep descent down a sand dune. The first cars heed the rule, “always keep your speed up on soft sand.” (Without launching off the crest of the dune.)
But then one of our VWs is told by his guide to drive to the extreme left of the entrance and plunges down the dune face and gets stuck. Luckily, he stopped before putting the car on its nose. The extraction only takes a few minutes (they’re getting much better at this having had a good deal of practice) and everyone is lined up for he run down the beach.
The tide is still quite high so the amount of beach that we can drive on is a bit narrow. Too high and you’ll get stuck in the soft beach sane. Too low and you’ll get swamped by the incoming surf. It would be better if we were at low tide but the times don’t work out and we have a fun drive avoiding the surf as it runs up the sand.
After maybe 50 kms, we stop. The exit from the beach to the dirt road that will lead us to the main highway requires that the cars cross a fairly wide stretch of soft beach sand. This is going to be a fun climax to three days in the desert.
Team 6 is the first to attempt the run across the beach. The guide gets in with the driver and sends him down the beach less than 100 meters, turns him a sharp 90 left and up the hard sand on to the soft beach sand. We can see that he doesn’t have a chance of making it across the sand without getting stuck. He is way too slow when he gets up the beach and the soft sand gently pulls him to a stop.
While the rest of the group jumps to the extraction of Team 6, the guide comes back for the VW van of Team 18. The guide has them drive almost exactly the same way with exactly the same result. As soon as both cars are extracted and the exit cleared, they wave up the VW Polo of Team 23. They almost make it through but at the every end of the soft sand the Polo gets stuck.
Another of the guides has had enough of this silliness and takes matters into his own hands and comes down the beach to silver VW of team 8. He sends the driver back down the beach a few hundred meters and returns toward the sand with much more speed and an almost direct line from the start of the run to the exit point in the soft sand. That approach finally puts all of the correct techniques together and the rest of the cars follow the same route and successfully cross the sand without getting stuck with cheers for all cars.
I’m last and move back down the beach even farther. When I reach the sand I’m doing about 70 mph and the LR gets up on the sand and rockets toward the exit of the soft sand. When the car gets into the ruts of the previous cars, I just let the car follow its path of least resistance which causes the car to looks like it’s out of control.
It’s not out of control but to the people watching they’re not convince and start to scatter. “Don’t lift until timing and scoring start to run.” Pinky who had been standing in the exit path started to run as I got closer. “I know you wouldn’t hit me.” I easily cross the sand. Good thing: they’d have never left me live it down if I had gotten stuck.
We get everyone together and get the sand ladders packed up and we’re off to another beach campsite for the night. Back to the main highway, another few kms to another dirt road to the beach and a camping area behind the dunes.
All of the beaches have some amount of trash, a lot of it blown or washed in from the ocean. On this beach, however, there’s a lot of trash behind the dunes and finding a clean enough spot to pitch the tents takes some searching. We find a suitable spot, park the car and setup.
After the last couple of nights of hard sleeping surfaces, I borrow Pinky’s sleeping cot that he doesn’t like, can’t get comfortable and would rather the thin sleeping mat. I can’t get the sleeping cot into my small one man tent so I put the entire tent on top of the cot and anchor everything to the LR. That looks like it will work out.
As the cars show up and setup, we have 8 of the 11 cars that left camp this morning. Teams, 2, 10 and 21 are missing and Dahid sends out a search party. A couple of hours later, they all finally arrive with Team 2 towing the Team 21 Volvo which not lost but seriously delayed by a breakdown. The Volvo had developed a cracked radiator and was constantly overheating from a lack of coolant.
In typical Challenge style, a half dozen gearheads descend on the car in a repair frenzy. A remarkable thing to witness. The first repair issue is to get the bonnet (hood to the Yanks out there) open which won’t open no matter how much they pull on the release cable. Of course, since this a security conscious Volvo nothing can be dis-assembled and the radiator accessed until the bonnet is opened. Unable to contribute to the repair frenzy I retire to have a drink.
We have another bar-b-que, this one roasted chicken, salad and rice. It’s simple and as good as the previous 2 night. Then back to the Volvo circus.
Somehow, they’ve gotten the bonnet open, dis-assembled the front of the car and removed the radiator. They are now trying to remove some epoxy that they have previously put on the leaks to seal them but the epoxy hasn’t worked. They are going to remove the original repair epoxy and use some other “liquid metal” type epoxy to seal the leaks. It’s going to be a long night for them.
Meanwhile, another campfire and then to the tent. Another great day in the desert. Tomorrow the beach, the crossing into Senegal and the Zebrabar.
Obi-Wan